A study of patients' expectations and satisfaction in Singapore hospitals

In today's highly competitive healthcare environment, hospitals increasingly realise the need to focus on service quality as a means to improve their competitive position. Customer-based determinants and perceptions of service quality therefore play an important role when choosing a hospital. This paper attempts to determine the expectations and perceptions of patients through the use of a generic, internationally used market research technique called SERVQUAL. An analysis covering 252 patients revealed that there was an overall service quality gap between patients' expectations and perceptions. Thus, improvements are required across all the six dimensions, namely, tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and accessibility and affordability.